The sociology of a Soviet village: 39 years of socialism in Kopanka

The centre of the village in 1983. On the left–the House of Culture, in the background–the department store

A look at the history and sociology of a Soviet village through the decades. From Socialism Theory and Practice Magazine, June 1983.

By Vladimir STAROVEROV

Just as a drop of water can reflect an ocean, so the portrayal of the life of one village can mirror the life of a people. A typical example is provided by the destiny of the villagers of Kopanka, situated in that part of Moldavia which used to be called Bessarabia (the territory lying between the Prut and Dniester rivers) .

It so happened historically that a part of the Moldavian people (the population of Bessarabia) who had won the right to a life of freedom together with all working people of Russia in 1917, was wrested by the Romania of landowners and the bourgeoisie in 1918 and remained under their rule until wrote 1940. In the late thirties bourgeois Romanian sociologists that the population of Bessarabia was on the decline. Having surveyed a number of villages they came to the conclusion that the village of Kapanka had no prospects for development.

Life itself refuted that conclusion. The development prospects of today’s Kopanka, just as of the entire Moldavian people, are clearly defined and are firmly embedded in the socialist system. The statistical data and evidence gathered from the sociological surveys conducted in 1937, 1961-1964 and 1980-1981 allow the changes that have occurred in the material and social life of the Kopanka villagers to be assessed.

Kopanka yesterday was “a village without a future”

A Village Without No Future

The data of the survey conducted by a team of bourgeois Romanian sociologists in 1937 in Kopanka showed the glaring contradiction between the rich natural environment and the destitution of the villagers.

The authors of the survey wrote that in lean years the villagers endured great privation, suffering from a dearth of food and fodder. Economic life was stagnating and many found themselves redundant. People left their homes and set out to earn a living elsewhere. But even when the harvest was good most peasants lived in want. A typical family of three or four consumed only one kilogram of meat per month. It almost never had wheat or rye flour, fish, milk and tea. Rush was used for fuel and the population had to economize on light.

Numerous facts are cited in the survey which attest to the poverty of the mass of the villagers who were fleeced by officials, profiteer traders and a handful of the local kulaks and money-bags. Ninety percent of the villagers had to work as farm hands in order to survive.

Exhausted by malnutrition and overwork, deprived of regular medical care the villagers all too often succumbed to disease. The survey said that the doctors who came to the village along with the sociologists examined 554 villagers and found that almost all of them were ill and in most cases seriously. The medics rated the sanitary conditions of the population as unsatisfactory. Malaria and syphilis were the two scourges that sapped the health of the Kopanka population.

The impoverishment of Kopanka inevitably caused a fall in its population. The death rate rose year after year, especially as far as children were concerned. Thus, 400 people died between 1928 and 1932, including 164 children under one year of age; the respective figures for 1933 1937 were 510 and 262. Even in good harvest years only one person in five died from old age.

In urging a solution to the land question which would stimulate the peasants to work for a better future, the bourgeois sociologists said that an end had to be put to the unjust social system. In Soviet times the villagers have convincingly demonstrated that they lack

neither the energy nor the willpower to build a better life.

Kopanka Today

In the early years of Soviet government (1940) landlord property rights were abolished and kulak property limited. In 1952, the villagers formed a collective farm which they named after V. I. Lenin. The change over from small and fragmented farms to collectively-owned and run large farms was a fundamental turning point in the lifestyle of the village. Socialist cooperation saved the villagers from ruin and poverty.

The state helped them drain the land that had been flooded by the Dniester year after year, thereby the area under orchards and plantations was increased; many farm jobs were mechanized and soil fertility improved. Crop yields sharply increased as a result. The output of vegetables and fruit had doubled by the early sixties, i.e. by the time the second sociological survey was carried out; the output of grapes increased 9.3 times in the fifties.

Over the twenty years that followed, the farms in Kopanka developed at the same vigorous pace. The farmlands did not expand during this period but the total output of grapes increased by 130 per cent, of vegetables by 150 per cent and of grain almost nine times. Labour productivity increased fivefold owing to improved working conditions and further advances in the mechanization, electrification and chemicalization of agriculture. This made it possible to use machinery to do arduous jobs and operations and cut the length of the working day.

The socialist cooperation of labour, the efficiency of the latest farm machinery, high labour productivity and standards of work provided the basis for the rise in the villagers' material welfare. Wages increased twenty times and more between the early 1950s and 1980. Sociological surveys show the level and quality of the villagers’ diet to have increased substantially (see the table).

In absolute terms the Kopanka villagers’ expenditure on food has been growing steadily, consuming, however, less of the family budget: about 45 percent in the early seventies and. under 40 percent in the late seventies. Meanwhile, expenditure on cultural and household articles and consumer durables has almost doubled over the past decade (1971-1980) and, more specifically, spending on the purchase of cars, motorcycles, has trebled, expenditure on furniture and other articles of household use has increased by eighty per cent, and on holiday making, excursions, etc. by 140 percent. It should be noted that passes for sanatoria, holiday hotels and Young Pioneer camps are issued free of charge or at cut rates (at thirty per cent of the actual cost).

The balance is paid from the collective farm’s social consumption fund. The collective farm’s expenditure on satisfying the cultural and everyday needs of the people of Kopanka has increased six times in the past twenty years.

The results of the latest survey, conducted in 1980-81, attest to the prosperity of the villagers as convincingly as the statistics. In defining his material status not a single villager rated it as unsatisfactory; 7.7 per cent of those polled assessed it as satisfactory, 86.6 per cent as good; while the rest had no precise answer.

The improvement of working and living conditions, advances in health care, and higher incomes have had a salutary effect on the state of public health. The survey conducted in the early 1960s registered that malaria, TB and venereal diseases had been wiped out in the village. A hospital, a maternity home and a pharmacy were built at the expense of the state. Over the next twenty years, the public health service was further improved. State subsidies for health care, mother and child welfare almost trebled per capita during this period.

All this was not long in affecting the birth rate. Several kindergartens were built in the village in the 1960s to accommodate a total of 300 children; four kindergartens were built in the 1970s.

A few more convincing figures would be in order here: in 1937 there was not a single person over the age of 80 in the village; in 1962 there were 47 of them and in 1980 - 140. A longer life-span is another proof of the beneficial social changes that have taken place in the village during the years of Soviet government.

Cultural Life

The survey by Romanian bourgeois sociologists gives us an idea of the cultural life in Kopanka in the late thirties. This picture is far from being complete but it eloquently speaks of the peasants’ backwardness and conveys the general atmosphere of “public indifference”.

Nine out of ten of the older generation and almost half the children of school age could neither read nor write then.

The bourgeois Romanian sociologists attributed Kopanka’s low cultural and educational standards to the fact that the villagers were allegedly in a state of “cultural infancy”. In reality, the villagers could not overcome their state of cultural backwardness because of the oppressive socio-economic conditions of their life.

A literacy campaign was launched in the village as soon as the Soviet government was established and illiteracy had been wiped out in Kopanka by 1952. More than one thousand peasants of the older generation were taught to read and write. This could have been achieved much earlier had it not been for the occupation of Moldavia by nazi Germany and her satellites during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). By the time of the 1961-1964 sociological survey the number of villagers with higher or secondary education had increased 4.6 times and 8.4 times among women villagers (as against 1952).

The 1980-81 survey showed that the difference in the villagers’ educational standards was due not to their property status, as had been the case in pre-Soviet times, but was solely due to age. Thus, young people aged between twenty and twenty nine had spent 2.3 times more years studying than those aged between fifty and fifty-nine. The rising educational standards led to the villagers having higher professional qualifications: 58 percent of all villagers are now engaged in skilled labour in crop and livestock farming.

Today the cultural life of the people of Kopanka is amply supported materially and organizationally; all the residents can read and write; secondary education for young people is compulsory; the village has a library, a small picture gallery, a cinema and a community centre where several amateur art groups are run on a regular basis.

But figures (e.g. the number of people with higher or secondary education, the annual cinema attendances, the number of visitors to the art gallery, etc.) alone are insufficient to show how the people and their way of thinking have changed. For example, how can one convey such changes in the people’s mentality as their spiritual emancipation, the development of a sense of personal dignity and responsibility for everything that is going on around them? These qualities are above all manifest in work.

The survey revealed that the majority are satisfied with their work. Only 1.4 per cent said they did not like their work; 2.8 per cent said they did not know and 0.3 per cent considered their work to be dull. This high degree of job satisfaction is due above all to efficient labour organization on the farm, mechanization and automation permitting to fuse agricultural and industrial techniques in production. Almost sixty per cent of the villagers were improving their professional skills at the time of the 1980-81 survey and most of them had already mastered one or several trades.

Seventy per cent of all those asked said they always worked “at full capacity”; 84 per .cent said they were keen to do their work better. Kopanka residents are not indifferent to shortcomings. Only a few of them said they did not care whether the next man worked negligently; 27 per cent of those polled criticized lazy workers at meetings and 45 per cent rebuked them.

In the late thirties many villagers left Kopanka for good in search of a decent living wage and a better life. Today, they do not seek a better lot elsewhere. Socialism has provided the residents of Kopanka with wide opportunities for choosing the job they would like in their home village and doing it to the best of their ability. It has also created the conditions necessary for the people to enjoy a full-fledged cultural life.

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Leaving out the years of the Great Patriotic War, Kopanka has lived under Soviet government for 39 years now. This is a short period historically and the successes made by the village are all the more significant. There are many such villages which were once denied a future in the land of Moldavia.

Prof V. STAROVEROV p D. Sc. (Philosophy), sector chief at the Institute of Sociological Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences, author of many works on the sociology of the Soviet village.